Oldest Recorded Computer Music
Included in the Ferranti Mark 1's instruction set was a hoot command, which enabled the machine to give auditory feedback to its operators. The sound generated could be altered in pitch, a feature which was exploited when the Mark 1 made the earliest known recording of computer music, playing a medley which included "God Save the King", "Baa Baa Black Sheep", and "In the Mood". The recording was made by the BBC towards the end of 1951, and the programming was done by Christopher Strachey, a maths teacher at Harrow and a friend of Alan Turing. It was not however the first computer to have played music – CSIRAC, Australia's first digital computer, achieved that with a rendition of Colonel Bogey.
Read more about this topic: Ferranti Mark 1
Famous quotes containing the words oldest, recorded, computer and/or music:
“The oldest books are still only just out to those who have not read them.”
—Samuel Butler (1835–1902)
“The force of truth that a statement imparts, then, its prominence among the hordes of recorded observations that I may optionally apply to my own life, depends, in addition to the sense that it is argumentatively defensible, on the sense that someone like me, and someone I like, whose voice is audible and who is at least notionally in the same room with me, does or can possibly hold it to be compellingly true.”
—Nicholson Baker (b. 1957)
“The Buddha, the Godhead, resides quite as comfortably in the circuits of a digital computer or the gears of a cycle transmission as he does at the top of a mountain or in the petals of a flower.”
—Robert M. Pirsig (b. 1928)
“Always, however brutal an age may actually have been, its style transmits its music only.”
—André Malraux (1901–1976)